The online journal of SUCCESS

Eyeball Soup

Steam rises from its beans and meatflecks. It billows politely around a dollop of cold sour cream.

As you gaze into the stew, my face—the face of a young, obese Steven Spielberg, “replete” with undirty baseball cap and full Jewish hair fanning out from beneath the cap’s circumference—appears to you in the chili-steam.

My spirit is evoked by the hot bowl of cooling chili!

Here I am! Who has summoned me?

I have bad news! You are pregnant!

No, that’s not fair. No one’s pregnant. I’m writing this Tale of the Beans for myself, because I feel burnt out.

I’ve more or less finished “Big project number one.” Now I have “time” to finish Big Project Number Two.

But my brain and me bones won’t cooperate.

I feel up against—a figurative wall.

My posture is bad, my breath bad.

I need a full day of Turkish Delight and instructional sex videos and Everything Is Terribleand hash amulets and K-holey sensory deprivation chambers and home fries and Chocolate Labrador Affection-Slaves before I can “restart” and knock BP#2 outta the park.

playing drums behind messy, “avant-pop” guitar played by a close friend

reading poetry aloud whilst drunk

drunk weeping emotional confessions of platonic love

90s releases on Matador & Drag City

indie-rock jukebox

friendly non-threatening dj

DISLIKES

relentless negativity

bodily harm

ailments

internet addiction/fatigue

a short-story collection I was excited to read which ended up contrived and annoying

the feeling that that well-dressed handsome asshole is going to steal my girlfriend

fear of The Road–style apocalypse where I am crippled by night-blindness and urbane cluelessness w/r/t farming and self-defense and so am helpless as zombies/marauders rape my loved ones and disembowel me with improvised weapons

LIKES:

Pickles, other pickled vegetables

british tv, british fiction, hypothetical british or angolophile or at least anglophone girlfriend

the idea of blogging seems really weird. I don’t know why writers do it. The idea of writing in a way that’s not careful seems kind of insane if you’re a fiction writer, or a long-form nonfiction writer. Maybe there’s something invigorating about it, but for me so much of the process is worrying about every word — just belching a bunch of stuff out there seems strange. Also the web is really weird. I don’t like the idea that stuff you write is just going to be on there, and people will be able to access it whenever, forever. A piece of writing should have its own little half-life and when people are no longer interested in reading or anthologizing, it should be forgotten.

Surely in general the writing that’s on blogs isn’t as careful as the kind of spit-polished prose that goes into journals or collections. But there’s nothing about the medium itself that means the writers using it aren’t being careful, and are just belching. Which is to say: revision is possible on the internet, and there’s PLENTY of belching going on in journals and books published by major publishers. And doesn’t all writing begin with a belch, a burp that then gets refined and revised until it’s distilled into a few vaporized bay leaves, a few million atoms of slow-simmered chili steam?